New Products

With a sleek silver-gray finish, full-color LCD screen, and seductive curves, the Harmony 890 is ready for the centerfold of Remote Monthly. But it's not just another pretty wand - the 890 sends commands to your system via both infrared and RF (radio-frequency) signals, so you don't even have to be in the same room as your gear.

Yes, it's two, two radios in one: the style is retro, but the technology is Space Age. Debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show and set for a spring launch, this tabletop model from Crosley offers AM and FM, but it's the company's first product equipped for XM satellite radio - hence its name, Explorer 1 ($250).

Podcasts, those audio recordings of your innermost thoughts that you share with every Internet-connected person on the planet, are easily done with a hodgepodge of hardware and software. But they're most easily done with M-Audio's Podcast Factory ($180), which has everything you need to record and edit your podcasts and post them as MP3 files on podcasting sites.

You hear a lot about how good speakers look on a wall. What you don't hear is that wall mounting can affect a speaker's performance. Good thing the PSB VisionSound VS300 speakers (center and front, $749 apiece) have special circuitry to compensate for any ill effects (a switch defeats it for off-wall mounting).

As convenient as it is to have music and video on things like iPods and cell phones, there are always times when you want some seriously big sound. That's where the Zvox Mini portable speaker ($200) can help.

Seems like a new portable video player drops from the sky every few minutes these days, but RCA's latest video Lyra has something worth catching: DirecTV2Go, which later this year will let you offload recorded programs from DirecTV PVRs to watch on the Lyra's 3.625-inch screen or any TV you hook it up to.